Social Enterprise Administration Program Announces New Leadership
The Social Enterprise Administration (SEA) program, which was created and sustained by Professor Sheila (“Shelley”) Akabas, who retired last year, has announced it will continue under the acting directorship of D’Elbert and Selma Keenan Professor Steven Schinke. Dr. Monique Jethwani-Keyser, who joined CSSW one year ago as a full-time lecturer, will serve as SEA convener. Both will work in partnership with the School’s full-time SEA faculty: Assistant Professors Mark Preston and Marcus Lam, and lecturer Rick Greenberg.
This transition will first and foremost preserve Professor Akabas’s remarkable legacy. For over four decades, she provided the leadership and educational vision to nurture the School’s Social Enterprise Administration method into the exceptional program it is today. Concurrently, under Professor Schinke’s oversight, the program will search for new areas of expansion and growth to ensure that SEA maintains its place as one of the most exciting areas of social work practice in the United States and globally.
When he joined Columbia’s faculty in 1986, Professor Steven Schinke devoted a good portion of his first months on the job collaborating with Dr. Akabas on a proposal to develop, implement, and evaluate aggressive approaches to combating the spread of HIV infection in New York City. Dr. Akabas’s remarkable background with the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation, labor unions, and other salient entities allowed these two pre-eminent professors and their teams to integrate science, practice, and community mobilization in novel, collaborative ways.
Subsequently at CSSW, Dr. Schinke has directed an active research program, taught, and served in administrative capacities. His acting directorship of SEA is a logical progression of his interests and career. Not long after coming to New York, he enrolled in the Executive MBA program at Columbia Business School. There, he learned management, marketing, and entrepreneurial skills aimed at promoting his applied research agenda. Leaving the MBA program to start his own business, Dr. Schinke built a successful startup that aimed to advance scientific interests in a for-profit environment. He also launched a nonprofit enterprise, which was later spun off.
Professor Schinke’s research agenda is focused on prevention science. His primary emphasis is on building, testing, and disseminating practical programs to reduce problem behavior among adolescents, primarily youths from disadvantaged backgrounds. He is working with a Silicon Valley dot-com company through the auspices of Columbia Technology Ventures to market and sell evidence-based prevention programs to schools and other youth-services organizations throughout the United States.
Professor Schinke brings to SEA experience in management, entrepreneurship, financial analysis, consulting, and for-profit and nonprofit organizational administration. He has an active program of research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and is also active in the nonprofit community. Currently, he is president and chairman of the board of a Connecticut-based environmental entity.
SEA convener, Dr. Monique Jethwani-Keyser, joined CSSW as a lecturer in the Fall of 2012 after her affiliation as a postdoctoral research scientist at the Center for Research on Fathers, Children, and Family Well Being. She was director of the Safe Harbor programs at Safe Horizon, where she developed curricula and managed the operation of the school-based victim assistance/violence prevention program in five public schools in NYC. Dr. Jethwani-Keyser has held positions in the New York County District Attorney’s Office, St. Mary’s Hospital for Children, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Her experience in training and in providing consultation for curriculum development and program planning for a number of community organizations adds dimension to the SEA program in which she currently teaches. Her expertise in research and evaluation in India, Bermuda, and the Virgin Islands provide important perspectives and is particularly valuable for our many international and U.S. students. Dr. Jethwani-Keyser received her Ph.D. from NYU’s School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; her MA from Harvard Graduate School of Education; and her BA from Barnard College.
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